I was an enthusiastic student debater, and an entrant in the Irish Times Debate, between 1969 and 1973. The height of my achievement was to win the individual speaker's prize on two occasions, in 1970 and 1973: I never won a team prize, despite being paired with some excellent debaters. I was a finalist in 1971 when the prize was won by Marian Finucane, the first ever women speaker to do so.
I was fortunate to learn my debating in UCD's L&H, the oldest and, on balance, the best debating society in the country. The society's distinguished antecedents were recalled a few weeks ago at a centenary commemoration of the presentation to it, in January 1900, of a paper by the 18-year-old James Joyce. The original of the paper is now in an American university, but the minutes of the meeting by Hugh Kennedy, later the first chief justice of the Irish Free State, survived here. Throughout the subsequent century the L&H was an early proving ground for many who went on to distinguished careers in law, medicine, journalism, literature and politics.
By the time I arrived in UCD at the very end of the 1960s, the L&H's emphasis was on entirely on debating. It met on Saturday nights in the old Physics Theatre in Earlsfort Terrace which (by a happy chance and not certainly by design) was the best debating venue I've ever known. The head of the society was known as the auditor, and in my first year this position was occupied by Gerry Barry, now the distinguished RTE journalist.
The L&H audience was critical, sometimes unruly and very vociferous. A hearing was always available, but it always had to be won. The main business of the L&H was public debate in which the principal attraction was a series of distinguished public figures from Ireland and sometimes Britain; student debaters were very much the hors d'ouevres and dessert of the occasion. Of the public figures, I recall, in particular, Brian Lenihan, James Dillon, Liam Cosgrave, Jack Lynch, Jo Grimond and Michael Foot.
The Irish Times Debate, then about a decade old, featured public speaking of quite a different kind. There, the emphasis was entirely on debating for its own sake. But since most of the speakers came from institutions similar to the L&H, the element of display and entertainment was never lost; even competitive debate never degenerated into the purely forensic exercise often found in the United States. There, the exercise of debating (sometimes an academic subject in itself) has been known to take place with no audience at all, which is quite contrary to the Irish or British tradition.
The audience was always central to Irish Times debaters, and additional spice was added by the long-standing rivalries between the various academic institutions involved, and especially between UCD and Trinity. Queen's Belfast was always a major player in the competition and its audience had an unaccountable reputation for rough partisanship.
The competition featured teams of two from each institution, and some individual speakers. It was organised on a knock-out basis. I can recall being paired on different occasions with Gerry Barry, Mary Finlay, who was the first female auditor of the L&H and is now a leading senior counsel, Declan O'Donovan, now ambassador to Japan, and Donal O Riain, an engineering student and now a multinational executive.
One of the things which enthused student debates of my time, apart from "the rigour of the game", was our admiration for our immediate predecessors. Figures like Henry Kelly, Dr Tony Clare, Paddy Cosgrave, Derek Davis and Brendan Keenan, who had thrived on debating in the mid to late 1960s, seemed admirable role models who had passed effortlessly from the student scene into enviable employments of one sort or another.
I recall an L&H Irish Times team on a visit to Belfast being entertained in the Europa Hotel by Henry Kelly, who was a recent ex-auditor and by then correspondent of The Irish Times in that city. He gave the amiable impression that the world was lucky to be his oyster.
In general, a great attraction of the competition to participants was the opportunity it offered to be modestly subvented on visits to other academic institutions. Queen's, Cork, Galway and the NUU were the staple destinations. But, for the winners of the Irish Times competition there were also trips to British universities to participate in the later stages of the Observer Mace competition.
I never distinguished myself in the trans-pontine competition, though other Irish speakers before and after my time had great success there. Paddy Cosgrave and Tony Clare in the 1960s and Conor Gearty, now a distinguished legal academic, Donal O'Donnell, now SC, and John O'Donnell, now a barrister, in the 1970s all won the Mace.
Another fine Irish debater, Philip McDonagh, now ambassador to India, was a distinguished president of the Oxford Union in the early 1970s. Philip, in particular, was a master of the more formal and cerebral style, which, I thought, distinguished the English debater from his more visceral and demotic Irish counterpart.
Esmonde Smyth (now President of the Circuit Court) had perhaps the most conspicuous British success, being selected with the winner of the Mace to represent the English-Speaking Union in the US. The Scottish style was much more akin to ours and I have vivid memories not only of debates in that country but of the overwhelming hospitality provided there, especially in Glasgow.
The Irish Times Debate was a showcase for the more enthusiastic debaters. In general, they were an articulate and ambitious lot. Behind the flamboyance almost inescapable in a successful debater, there was a lot of research done and lengthy co-ordination sessions between team members. The competition was a lot of fun, but almost everyone was quite clear that he or she wanted to win and would be put out by failure. A good deal of anxious discussion focused on the likely prejudices of the judges, generally including an Irish Times representative, academics and former winners.
A major difference between the competition and normal university debating was that in the latter, one invariably spoke on the side of a motion in which one believed; in the competition, there was no such luxury. I can recall being put to defending the human-rights record of the Soviet Union with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.
Of the Irish Times figures associated with the competition in my time, I remember with particular affection two now deceased, Michael McInerney and Christina Murphy. They had immense enthusiasm for the competition and patience in listening to the often callow if occasionally scintillating efforts of the students. Their judgments were kindly and constructive and their sustained interest gave us an inkling of the underlying value of the exercise.
It inculcated a desire to communicate, to convince by argument and a need to listen acutely to the other side. It taught an appreciation of one's colleagues and opponents in equal measure and allowed one to get to know them well. It introduced young students to those somewhat more advanced in life, sometimes with significant consequences in emulation or aversion. And it inculcated in many an awkward youth a self-confidence which endured long after college days.
